One morning, as I was crossing a footbridge with no one around, I started to exhibit flu-like symptoms. It was immediately clear to me that the problem didn’t come from exposure to germs, contrary to what I used to think in the past.
I prayed to know that my health and my freedom are not at the mercy of an inopportune meeting or an accident, or at the mercy of any particular set of circumstances, but they rest on the divine grace that maintains the harmony of all being, including my life.
In a radical way, this inspired perception of spiritual truth helped me see and refute the lie of illness. The lie was simply a mental intrusion that I didn’t have to accept—an error of belief that said I was vulnerable to illness and suffering. This lie was actually nothingness, a false supposition that the flu could present itself as something—a convincing reality—but I didn’t fall for it.
This truth was fixed in my thinking. My throat, which had become irritated, went back to a normal feeling in the next few minutes, and that was the end of the problem.
God is All-in-all and ever present, and evil has never had a place in His infinite government.
Mary Baker Eddy wrote in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “Error would have itself received as mind, as if it were as real and God-created as truth; but Christian Science attributes to error neither entity nor power, because error is neither mind nor the outcome of Mind” (p. 555).
God is All-in-all and ever present, and evil has never had a place in God’s infinite government. I’m happy to understand this in some measure and to have made progress spiritually in that regard.
Every time I’m tempted to associate a belief in sickness or sin with any cause, I’m always reminded of what our Master, Christ Jesus, did. He destroyed evil—he didn’t allow it to have a voice, since, as he told us, evil, Satan, is “a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44), having neither true power nor entity.
A dear friend reminded me once of what Mary Baker Eddy said in Science and Health: “Evil has no reality. It is neither person, place, nor thing, but is simply a belief, an illusion of material sense” (p. 71). I’m grateful to understand this fact better and to better understand that evil is illusion and has no cause.
